Sight-seeing visits to the Premier League’s top four are no good to Spurs. They crave permanent membership. Almost sweeter than a regular place among the Champions League qualifying quartet is the knowledge that Arsenal will be the club kicked to the kerb along the way.

So Tottenham Hotspur had two reasons to rejoice with this 2-1 win. One was the bare fact of victory over the artists down the road. The other was the growing sense that Spurs are increasingly well-placed to compete with Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea in the league’s highest echelon.

Arsenal are not. Now five points adrift of the fourth Champions League qualifying spot – and seven adrift of Spurs – the Gunners display a soft core and a manager in denial.

The block of four that once expressed Arsenal’s physical and mental strength was not one you would throw yourself against willingly. Martin Keown, Sol Campbell, Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Petit were not there for tea and cakes.

Now, two centre-backs with attention deficits operate behind two central midfielders press-ganged into defensive roles. Mikel Arteta and Aaron Ramsey will never provide the screening cover that a suspect Arsenal back four require. In the big games, against incisive opponents, this open-door policy is disastrous.

Spurs, on the other hand, radiate strength and purpose. They still lack the aristocratic capacity to control whole games but they have become skilled at winning tight contests.

They are unbeaten now in 12 league games: their best sequence since the 14-match run of 1984-85. Gareth Bale scored again. But to call them a one-man team would ignore the magnificent defending of Jan Vertonghen – deservedly the man of the match – as well as their enterprise on the flanks and power through the middle.

For so long Spurs have had to endure the glamour and cosmopolitanism of Arsenal, with their Elysian training ground at London Colney and their multicultural set-up.

Though they have yet to win it, Arsène Wenger’s men are Champions League habitués. Wenger’s get-out is that Arsenal always make it through to Europe’s premier competition. Spurs might just make it in an exceptional year. Their real role, though, was scrapping with the likes of Everton in places five-to-seven.

Not any more. With Bale as their poster-boy and game-changing goalscorer, this team have risen a notch. The brutal lessons learnt by Villas-Boas at Chelsea have been put to good use. No longer does he display a need to impose himself on his players.

The mission handed to him by Roman Abramovich was one of major cultural restructuring. Here at Spurs he merely has to refine a formula already geared to winning games through self-expression.

Villas-Boas’s reference to the “negative spiral” pulling Arsenal down will be music to Tottenham’s fans. Their manager also spoke of his own team’s “positive spiral”, just to really put the boot in.

This game settled a long-standing argument. It felt like a definitive test of the two squads. If you were a Middle-Eastern consortium looking to add a Premier League team to your post-oil international asset portfolio there is no doubt you would pick the one of Vertonghen and Bale over that of Per Mertesacker and Olivier Giroud.

Spurs are not only a collection of good players all moving in the same direction. As Villas-Boas pointed out, the club are gaining strength at every level. Their new training ground is the envy of most other Premier League clubs. One visiting manager described it as “immaculate”.

As Villas-Boas said: “The club is taking major steps into the future in terms of investment and the players too. It’s possible the club will be turned into a big club in England for the future.” Arsenal are clinging to grandeur. Spurs are staking out the next 10 years.

They have tasted the Champions League nectar under Harry Redknapp but they still appeared unlikely to break into the league’s top three. Now they sit above Villas-Boas’s old club, Chelsea. Even crunching injuries are shrugged off.

Emmanuel Adebayor, who left on a stretcher, and Moussa Dembele are expected to be fit for the Europa League tie against Inter Milan on Thursday, despite both going down in agony.

At the back, Spurs can call on Vertonghen, the revitalised Michael Dawson and Steven Caulker, a defender of great promise, at centre-half. Kyle Walker is a strong, combative presence at right-back. In goal Hugo Lloris has settled nicely into the No 1 spot. In the deep positions, Dembele and Scott Parker offer might and menace. Out wide, Gylfi Sigurdsson and Aaron Lennon bring thrust and ingenuity. Lewis Holtby, meanwhile, was a useful addition from Germany.

The team’s only glaring weakness is at centre-forward, where Jermain Defoe has lost his starting place again and Adebayor looks out of synch with Tottenham’s sweeping style of play.

The compensating factor, of course, is Bale, who is following Cristiano Ronaldo’s path from winger to central striker. Even when Ramsey moved to right-back for Arsenal (blood in the water time for a shark, you would think), Bale stayed through the middle, hounding Mertesacker and Thomas Vermaelen, whose concentration lapses around the penalty box are becoming a major worry.

Two European games in a week against Inter Milan and one in between at Liverpool will test Tottenham’s progress further, yet there is no reason to expect an implosion between now and May, even if the middle of April (13 and 20) brings back-to-back fixtures against Chelsea and Manchester City.

“There is a great focus in the team to make sure we qualify for the Champions League again,” Villas-Boas said. It runs even deeper than that. Spurs want to put a boot on Arsenal’s head and keep it there.